Revision of <em>HOWTO Specify the Header File Include Path for use with MinGW Compilers</em> from <em>2008, November 24 - 16:29</em>

Posted November 21st, 2008 by keith

FIXME: Page under construction; not much useful content yet!!!

I will add to this as time permits; please bear with me. My intent is to provide answers to some remarkably similar, but independently asked, questions which have appeared recently, on the MinGW-Users and MinGW-MSYS lists.

On a normal Unix system, if you do not instruct it otherwise,
[GCC] will look for headers requested with #include <file> in:
/usr/local/include
libdir/gcc/target/version/include
/usr/target/include
/usr/include
For C++ programs, it will also look in /usr/include/g++-v3, first.

Of course, the MinGW ports of GCC target Microsoft's Windows system, which is not a "normal UNIX system". Nevertheless, many users, particularly those coming from a UNIX or GNU/Linux background, and especially when they use MSYS to emulate a UNIX file system model on their MS-Windows hosts, are surprised to find that MinGW, using its default configuration, does not automatically search for header files in these directories.

MinGW's Default Include Path

So, if MinGW doesn't search in these "normal" directories, where does it search?

Before answering this, it may be useful to understand whyMinGW doesn't search in these directories. Firstly, on a native MS-Windows host, these directories do not typically exist; the multiply rooted nature of the file system means that such path names would be ambiguous. Secondly, since MinGW itself is not a suite of MSYS applications, even if such directories are created in the MSYS environment, MinGW would have no means to locate them.

Thus, to avoid imposing draconian restrictions on how users install MinGW, the maintainers have chosen to adopt a restricted search paradigm, which is determined on the basis of where MinGW is itself installed. The actual search path, for any specific installation of MinGW may be determined, by running the compiler itself, with the "-v" option; typically, for a GCC-3.4.5 installation in c:/mingw:--